Sony TZ slow starting up/slow turning off

Hi, i am hoping someone can give me a bit of advise here. I have, since 2 months, a Sony vgn-tz10mn. I am digital photographer and bought the laptop to take with me on assignments, to load and view my images and at times to access the internet. I really like the laptop but i have annoying issues with it which even make me think of selling it!

It takes ages to start up, at least 4-5 minutes before it is fully operational and it takes at least 3 minutes to boot down. Very annoying.

I do not run anything else on except the software the machine came with, with the exception of AVG and Breezebrowser, a software program to quickly view my images

I can see that there is a lot of Sony software on the machine (in add-remove programms) and i was wondering if there is anything i can take off to increase the speed.

I am running Vista.

Can someone pls advise? Also the laptop is standard spec.

Many thanks
Rene

 

Fortunately, there is a bit you can do to really speed up your machine. Sony machines unfortunately have the most bloatware of any computers in the industry, the low end TZ models with the standard 1.8" hard drive especially are almost unusable factory fresh and several people return them not knowing the problem. I have tried the North American equilvalent of yours at a store and it took two minutes just to start up MS Word ,ridiculous!

Your model has only 1gb of ram, which is the bare minimum for resource-hungry Vista and with all the bloatware and your slow Ipod-sized hard drive, no wonder its so slow!

The best thing to do is install 2gb of ram in it, remember it only has one ram slot, so buy a 2gb stick to replace the 1gb stick in it.

You can do a clean install of Vista or install Windows XP, there's guides to that in this forum, do a search and don't get rid of it just yet.

 

Well, thats really long.. TZ10MN? So U7500, 1GB ram and 1,8" HDD = the worst config to run Vista.. Try buy 2GB ram stick, try delete all of the bloatware or run XP
If I were you I would buy XP and installed them.. Vista is not fully optimized for laptops (IMO) - i had it for 4 moths on SZ (1,83Ghz, 2GB ram, 5400 rpm drive) now i have TZ with XP and it seems much faster even with 1,2Ghz and 1GB ram... Start up is about 45s (when everything is loaded) and turning off lasts about 35s...

 

Actually, Vista is better optimized for laptop than XP in general. But you do need to tweak it for slower hardware. Here is guide wrote by a flamenko. I read it sometime ago and it is actuall very good.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

 

In addition to the other suggestions, another fix for a slow startup is to avoid it by using hibernation. I only start a notebook when demanded by a software update, otherwise I try to go for a week or two using only hibernation.

John

 

In fact, the Vista help section states laptops should be put in hibernation or sleep mode, rather than turned off, when not in use. I personally still shut mine down because boot-up is so fast with my configuration and Vista optimized but, in your case, using one of these modes would make sense.

 

I would suggest a clean Vista install. Even better would be to set up a dual boot with XP if you are up to it.

To give you an example of the difference a clean install can make when I got my SZ58 it would take about 2.5-3 minutes to boot and an equally long time to shutdown, sometimes it wouldn't even shut down at all. This I can't live with. So I reinstalled Vista and my boot time now is 30-35 seconds and shut downtime 10-15 seconds max.